Transformation of the West
Introduction
The American West was vastly transformed during the “Gilded Age”. As railroads traversed the nation, crime became a major problem, and the rise of industry prompted a response by environmentalists.
As far-reaching as the transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance had been, I don’t think that anyone around 1800 could have predicted the even more profound changes that would occur in the nineteenth century. When Napoleon met defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Europe's population was 200 million, with as many as 25 million people of European descent living in the rest of the world. When World War I began in 1914, these numbers dropped to 450 million and 150 million, respectively. In 1815 most Europeans and Americans lived in rural villages and worked the land; during the nineteenth century millions migrated from the countryside to cities, and by 1914, in highly industrialized nations such as Great Britain, a majority of the population was urban. In 1815, despite two decades of democratic revolution, most governments were aristocratic and monarchical; in 1914 representative assemblies and universal manhood suffrage were the norm in most of Europe, the United States, and the British dominions of Canada, Australia. and New Zealand. In 1815 most governments limited
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In the short run, they are right: Violent crime did increase between 1985 and 1990. But what really worries most people is not the short-run trend but their sense that violent crime has been climbing steadily for a long time and that the future will only bring further increases. Such worries are linked to anxiety about drugs, permissive childrearing, hedonism, declining academic standards, the growth of the ghetto underclass, and our collective inability to compete with the Japanese. Taken together, these fears have convinced many sensible people that American society is on the